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Elizabeth Jelin - State Repression & The Labors of Memory C6
Elizabeth Jelin - State Repression & The Labors of Memory C6
Elizabeth Jelin - State Repression & The Labors of Memory C6
Engendered Memories
If we close our eyes and attempt to envision the “human” side of the
dictatorships in the Southern Cone, one image dominates the scene:
the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Then, other women come into sight:
the Familiares, Abuelas, Viudas, Comadres (Relatives, Grandmothers,
Widows, and Other Kin) of the disappeared or of political prisoners,
Copyright © 2003. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
denouncing the arrests and searching for their children (which in the
image are usually sons), their grandchildren, their husbands, or part-
ners. On the other side, we see the military in full display of their mas-
culinity. There is a second image that emerges, specific to the Argentine
case: that of young pregnant female prisoners, giving birth in clandes-
tine detention centers and then disappearing. This image is haunted
by the uncertainty about the whereabouts of their children, kidnapped
or stolen, who would later be given false identities. On the other side,
once again, is the image of the hypermasculine military.
The gender contrast in these images is clear and comes back time
and again in a wide range of contexts. Personalized symbols of pain
and suffering tend to become embodied in women, while institutional
repressive mechanisms appear to “belong” to men.
In the television reporting linked to the Pinochet case, from the time
of his arrest in London in October 1998 and all through his detention in
Chile up to 2001, the differential presence of men and women was also
76
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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Engendered Memories 77
Repression Is Gendered
The repression carried out by the dictatorships of the Southern Cone
had clear gender specificities.1 It affected men and women differently,
given their differential positions within the gender system—positions
that imply different life experiences and markedly different hierarchi-
cally organized social relations.2
Let us begin by examining the physical or bodily experience of
repression, involving actual practices and direct victims of torture,
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Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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78 Engendered Memories
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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Engendered Memories 79
the feminine and passive on the other was seen as natural among the
military. This was also the dominant interpretive framework among
guerrilla groups and in society at large. In the representations of the
guerrillera (the female guerrilla fighter) that circulated in the Argen-
tine media during dictatorship, femininity was always ambiguous. On
one hand the image was one of a masculinized woman, in uniform
and bearing arms, rejecting femininity altogether. The media also rec-
ognized, however, the women militants who acted as young innocent
girls using their youth and femininity to deceive and infiltrate in order
to carry out attacks.7 As a mirror image, the guerrilla movement also
had difficulties in incorporating the femininity of women militants.
The acceptance of women was always in doubt, and when they
demonstrated their abilities in armed operations, they were seen as
“pseudomales” (Franco 1992, 108). A desexualized and masculinized
self-identification is also evident in several testimonials written by fe-
male ex-prisoners and former militants.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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80 Engendered Memories
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cornell/detail.action?docID=367974.
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Engendered Memories 81
children and other relatives. In the first place, the climate of terror
in which they lived often required silencing what had happened, and
even covering up personal suffering. To avoid arousing suspicion,
women had to attempt to maintain a semblance of normal life for
their children, “as if nothing had happened.” Fear and silence were
constantly present, and they exacted a very high emotional cost. In
many cases, solitude was a central feature of the experience. Whether
because they did not want to put at risk other relatives or friends, or
because those relatives or friends distanced themselves due to fear or
disapproval, the social networks within which everyday domestic life
used to take place were completely destroyed, fractured, broken.8
Exile is a different story. It was often the result of the political com-
mitment of men, and women had to accompany their partners or rela-
tives not as a result of their own political project and activism but as
wives, daughters, or mothers. Under such circumstances, the effects of
the experience of exile are undoubtedly different from an exile result-
ing from one’s own political project or public commitment. As with
other circumstances of repression, the gendered character of exile is
an issue about which little has been done in a systematic or analytical
form, beyond the accumulation of testimonies.
We must not forget, however, that men too were “indirect” vic-
tims, and as such they are completely invisible. Little is known about
this particular personal experience. It has not been a massive one to
Copyright © 2003. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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82 Engendered Memories
1970s, these spaces had played significant roles in the everyday expe-
rience of masculinity, insofar as they represented instances of “homo-
sociality, of exchanges between men, that at the same time linked and
enabled constant flows between different sectors of Chilean society”
(Olavarría 2001, 4). The transformations of these spaces wrought by
the repression unleashed by the dictatorship had the effects of limiting
the range of networks and social relations, “in the case of men, to the
sphere of the family, the neighborhood, and work itself” (5). This was
not a case of imprisonment or torture but one of feelings of passivity
and impotence.
Repression was carried out by masculine and patriarchal institu-
tions—the armed forces and the police. These institutions imagined
themselves as missionaries destined to reestablish the “natural” (gen-
der) order of things. In their visions, they had to permanently remind
women of their place in society—as the guardians of the social order,
as the nurturers of husbands and children, and in charge of protect-
ing family harmony and tranquility. It was they who were at fault for
the transgressions of their children, and also for the subversion of the
“natural” hierarchy between men and women. The military regimes
supported and tried to impose a discourse and an ideology based on
family values. The patriarchal family was more than the central meta-
phor of their regimes. It was literal reality (Filc 1997).9
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Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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Engendered Memories 83
ties, their fears and feelings of insecurity. They remember within the
framework of family relationships, because women’s subjective expe-
rience of time is organized by and linked to reproductive events and
affective ties (Leydesdorff, Passerini, and Thompson 1996).
In the case of memories of repression, moreover, many women
narrate their memories in the context of their more traditional gen-
der role, that of caregiver and nurturer, of “living for others.” This
is linked to the definition of an identity centered on tending to and
caring for others, generally within the frame of family relations. The
ambiguity of the position, between that of active agent and that of
passive companion and caretaker, may show up then in a displace-
ment of their own identity, prompting them to “narrate the other.” In
the double sense of the notion of witness that was presented earlier, this
implies the choice to be a witness-observer of another person’s protago-
nism (a disappeared son, for example), negating or silencing testimony
about her own life experiences, although they will undoubtedly slip
into the narratives that are apparently centered on others.
Men’s memories, and their modes of narration, point in another di-
rection. Their testimonies are often found in public documents, judicial
testimonies, and journalistic reports. Spoken narratives, narrated in
public contexts and transcribed into “material evidence,” are framed
within expectations of justice and political change. While these tes-
timonies may undoubtedly empower and legitimize the voice of the
Copyright © 2003. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cornell/detail.action?docID=367974.
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84 Engendered Memories
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cornell/detail.action?docID=367974.
Created from cornell on 2020-12-11 02:14:45.
Engendered Memories 85
ing visible the invisible,” “giving voice to those that have no voice.”
Women’s voices tell different stories than men’s, thus introducing into
the public space of debate a plurality of viewpoints and worldviews.
This perspective also implies the recognition and legitimization of ex-
periences other than those considered dominant or hegemonic (mostly
those of men and those enunciated from positions of power). This fos-
ters the circulation of diverse narratives: those that focus on political
militancy, on suffering related to repression, on the organization of
everyday life under repressive regimes, or on emotions and subjectivi-
ty. These are the “other” faces of history and memory, the untold be-
ginning to be voiced and listened to.
Let us take the case of the (mostly Korean) women that were kid-
napped by the Japanese armed forces to establish “comfort stations,” a
type of sexual slavery designed to serve the Japanese occupation forces
during World War II (Chizuko 1999). It is estimated that anywhere
between 80,000 and 120,000 women were forced into these camps.
Although the existence of these comfort stations was widely known
both in Korea and Japan (a book was published on the subject in
the 1970s, and it became a best-seller in Japan), the sexual slavery
to which these women were subject was redefined as a crime only in
the 1980s and became a highly controversial and visible political issue
only in the 1990s.13
The women who were kidnapped in Korea remained silent for fifty
Copyright © 2003. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
years. There was not a single testimony until the early 1990s, and it
is quite likely that there are still many victims who have not come
forth.14 They began to speak, in part, as the result of the efforts of
the feminist movement, particularly through the creation of a Korean
women’s organization that encouraged the victims to tell their stories.
For these women, narrating their testimonies offered the opportunity
to recuperate a silenced past and in the process begin to regain their
human dignity.
But there is more to this story. In this coming to voice of the victims,
so argues Chizuko, history itself is remade. Whereas before the debate
about “what actually happened” was maintained within the bounds
of a history written “from above,”15 when a victim (or survivor)
“begins spinning the fragmentary thread of her own narrative, tell-
ing a story that announces ‘my reality was not the kind of thing you
think,’ an alternative history emerges, relativizing the dominant one at
a stroke” (Chizuko 1999, 143). We know, however, that testimonial
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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86 Engendered Memories
ern Cone, the memories of torture.16 There is little doubt that narra-
tives of torture and the emotions they express are different in women
and in men. Jean Franco (1992) points out that the personal narra-
tives of torture victims tend to be laconic and euphemistic. Women
feel shame when they narrate their experiences. In accusatory testimo-
nials (before human rights commissions or as witnesses in trials), for
example, they recount being raped without giving details or describ-
ing the event itself. In less “normalized” or bureaucratic contexts, the
contrast between men and women’s narratives may be sharper. Franco
illustrates the difference between the story of a man who describes
his experience as a “loss of his manhood” and of being “forced to
live like a woman” (Valdés 1996), and the narrative of a woman who
draws the strength to survive from her identity in motherhood, which
allows her to keep a sense of herself during torture and feel close to
other women prisoners. In this case, the testimony even mentions the
ways in which, in order to “remake” the world that the torturers were
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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Engendered Memories 87
seeking to destroy, she takes refuge in the children’s songs that she
used to sing to her daughter (Partnoy 1988).
Personal memories of prison and torture are powerfully inflected
by the centrality of the body. The possibility of incorporating them into
the field of social memories poses an ethical dilemma and a real para-
dox: the act of repression violated privacy and intimacy, breaching the
cultural division between public and private arenas. Overcoming the
traumatic void created by repression calls for opening up the possibili-
ty of elaborating a narrative memory of the lived events (thus turning
them into an “experience” with meaning), a process that is necessarily
public, in the sense that it has to be shared with others—others who
will, at least in principle, be able to understand and nurture the vic-
tim. Yet despite the fact that these others are not anonymous or that
they are not the perpetrators, they remain “others”—an alterity. At
the same time, the recuperation of “normalcy in life” requires the re-
construction of the self, which includes the reconstruction of intimacy
and privacy. At this point, silences are fundamental in these personal
narratives. Often these are not lapses, but personal decisions to omit
details as a way of “managing and controlling the reconstruction of
identity” (Pollak and Heinich 1986, 5), tied to the “recuperation of
shame” (Amati Sas 1991). How then to combine the need to construct
a public narrative that at the same time contributes to the recupera-
tion of intimacy and privacy? The paradox is real. Recognizing it may
Copyright © 2003. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cornell/detail.action?docID=367974.
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88 Engendered Memories
system are very slow and difficult. To the extent that they take place,
they can imply a resignification and transformation of the memories
of armed struggle and of political violence and repression. In fact, the
struggles over memory are traversed by existing gender relations and
by the ways in which the actors of the past are visualized in terms of
the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. The challenge for the
present and the future lies in critically deconstructing and analyzing
the actual experiences of men and women and the existing gender im-
ages, to be able to place them in their historical context and extract
from it alternatives for future change.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cornell/detail.action?docID=367974.
Created from cornell on 2020-12-11 02:14:45.